Love Island was back, which meant Granny Tinder had work to do
The new series of Love Island was beginning and Scott and Chris brought back one of their favourite unofficial experts.
Granny Tinder returned to assess the new contestants from their photographs and profiles.
Her granddaughter helped talk her through the line-up, including men such as Davide and fishmonger Luca Bish.
The point was not really to predict who would win.
It was to hear a grandmother who was not immersed in Love Island culture respond to the tattoos, jobs, poses and carefully written dating biographies as though she were assessing ordinary potential partners.
Her reactions were usually much more practical than the television show itself.
Innuendo Bingo was starting to feel possible again
The programme was also looking backwards.
A collection of classic Innuendo Bingo editions was available on BBC Sounds, bringing back memories of years when Chris and a celebrity could simply fill their mouths with water and spray one another without anybody thinking much about infection control.
Old appearances included major names from the show’s history, and Scott and Chris began openly talking about how much they missed the feature.
The difficulty was obvious.
After the pandemic, putting two people face-to-face and deliberately encouraging them to spit water at each other felt impossible to revive in exactly the old form.
Still, the enthusiasm for the archive clips was planting an idea which would become much more important over the following week.
The Who Game remembered things that had vanished surprisingly quickly
The Who Game returned to subjects people had once talked about constantly and then quietly stopped mentioning.
One example was the habit of calling Twitter followers “tweeps”.
Another was the brief period when Squid Game costumes seemed destined to dominate Halloween.
The game suited the show perfectly: things did not have to be ancient to feel oddly historical.
Sometimes a word, craze or costume from only a year or two earlier was enough to make everybody ask why it had once seemed so unavoidable.
COMMENTS